The Loft Group traditionally designed and printed training manuals most notably for the Australian subsidiary of the world's largest cosmetics and beauty company, L'Oréal. Identifying changing market demands and an opportunity to revolutionise its business, the company developed a software-based design and delivery platform which completely digitized all client materials. After reviewing competitive bids from other well-known cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, The Loft Group selected SoftLayer, an IBM company, as the cloud platform for its global, digital e-learning campaigns.

Among other reasons, The Loft Group was attracted to IBM’s Softlayer because the technology provided the company’s customer support teams with the ability to use analytics to monitor and tune their networks, providing consistent and effective performance.

“Moving our services to the cloud allows us to achieve global scale and consistent performance across multiple countries, helping us grow at a pace which would have otherwise taken anywhere from 3-5 years,” said Garry Russell, The Loft Group product and services director. “To maintain our high standards of customer service, we wanted to be able to simultaneously monitor our global environment and load balance, as well as tune our performance to our customer's needs in real time. Being able to precisely and quickly respond to our customers’ needs in every country is a critical pillar of our global expansion, and this level of performance tuning was one of SoftLayer’s biggest differentiators.”

The Loft Group’s cloud-based digital delivery method provides clients with an exclusive and personalised learning environment tailored to business and employee needs - engaging all learning styles with interactive modules; and encouraging participants to create their own scripts, highlight existing course content, and record memories of class activities with photos and videos. Accessible via smartphones or tablets anywhere and anytime, the mobile platform ensures each employee’s education journey continues to evolve and remain relevant to changing business and industry needs.

“IBM’s reputation as a tier one IT provider was a focal point when we were going through the selection process,” said Gavin Russell, The Loft Group CEO and founder. “By working with a well-regarded company such as IBM, we are able to inspire confidence in our clients that our platform would be hosted in a robust and secure cloud environment. Global giants such as L’Oréal are extremely prudent when it comes to deploying new technology within their organizations, so having IBM’s brand power behind us makes it that much easier to get our business pitches across the line with clients.”

Launched earlier this month in Australia and New Zealand, The Loft Group’s now cloud-based learning platform will soon be available across Asia, Europe and North America in the coming months.

“The success of The Loft Group is an excellent demonstration of the power, security and agility that cloud computing can deliver – enabling a grassroots, local company of modest size to tackle global markets, quickly adapt to changing market and technology demands and expand at an extraordinary rate,” said Dean Evans, Cloud Computing Executive, IBM Australia and New Zealand. “Using IBM’s cloud services, The Loft Group is now doing what previously only large companies with deep enterprise IT architectures could do. We are thrilled to not only be an integral part of The Loft Group’s journey, but also of the immense transformation possibilities cloud computing is bringing to businesses of all sizes.”

About IBM Cloud Computing

IBM is the global leader in cloud with an unmatched portfolio of open cloud solutions that help clients to think, build or tap into it. No other company has the ability to bring together unique industry knowledge and unmatched cloud capabilities, that have already helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 16 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. IBM expects to achieve $7 billion in annual cloud revenue by 2015. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

About The Loft Group

The Loft Group is a creative digital agency which specialises in providing business consultancy through software solutions. Established in 2007, the Australian company constructs purpose-built digital infrastructure for clients to create online communities and harness the organisation’s communications, education, and human connections into one place, accessible from any channel.
he Loft Group lives and breathes a philosophy of customer intimacy and are committed to discovery, originality and entrepreneurship. With a Melbourne-based head office, the business is rapidly moving towards becoming a trusted business consultant, software developer and IT based business with satellite offices throughout Australia.